Description:

Marie Atkinson Hull (American/Mississippi, 1890-1980), "Tenant Fa. Note: During the mid to late 1930s, Marie Hull completed a group of portraits of Mississippi tenant farmers (sometimes titled Sharecroppers). The sitters were often neighbors from nearby farms, with several sitters painted a number of times. Hull built on the skills she had learned at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to delicately represent the anatomy of the sitters in order to “capture the essence of personality.” In all of these portraits, Hull developed a sense of empathy for the farmers, many of whom were feeling the strains of the Great Depression. The backgrounds of almost all of the tenant farmer portraits include vast areas of farm land, representing the sitters’ ties to the terrain. In the painting presented here, Hull has left the background somewhat abstract, although a cabin or farmhouse can be noticed in the distance. The brushwork of the fields and sky are particularly vibrant and expressionistic, a precursor to Hull’s later abstract paintings beginning in the 1950s. Ref.: Levingston, Bruce. Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015; Norwood, Malcolm M., Virginia McGehee Elias and William S. Haynie. The Art of Marie Hull. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975.

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April 13, 2019 10:00 AM CDT
New Orleans, LA, US

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